DesignCon 2022 Schedule Builder

Deploying advanced Machine Learning technology to serve customers and/or business needs requires a rigorous approach and production-ready systems. This is especially true for maintaining and improving model performance over the lifetime of a production application. Unfortunately, the issues involved and approaches available are often poorly understood.

An ML application in production must address all of the issues of modern software development methodology, as well as issues unique to ML and data science. Often ML applications are developed using tools and systems that suffer from inherent limitations in testability, scalability across clusters, training/serving skew, and the modularity and reusability of components. In addition, ML application measurement often emphasizes top level metrics, leading to issues in model fairness as well as predictive performance across user segments

Rigorous analysis of model performance at a deep level, including edge and corner cases is a key requirement of mission-critical applications. Measuring and understanding model sensitivity is also part of any rigorous model development process.

We discuss the use of ML pipeline architectures for implementing production ML applications, and in particular we review Google’s experience with TensorFlow Extended (TFX), as well as available tooling for rigorous analysis of model performance and sensitivity. Google uses TFX for large scale ML applications, and offers an open-source version to the community. TFX scales to very large training sets and very high request volumes, and enables strong software methodology including testability, hot versioning, and deep performance analysis.